One quote from Taleb's AntiFragile is here, and here's another:
Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.
The greatest irony is that we watched firsthand how narratives of thought are made, as we were lucky enough to face another episode of blatant intellectual expropriation. We received an invitation to publish our side of the story—being option practitioners—in the honorable Wiley Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance. So we wrote a version of the previous paper mixed with our own experiences. Shock: we caught the editor of the historical section, one Barnard College professor, red-handed trying to modify our account. A historian of economic thought, he proceeded to rewrite our story to play down, if not reverse, its message and change the arrow of the formation of knowledge. This was scientific history in the making. The fellow sitting in his office in Barnard College was now dictating to us what we saw as traders—we were supposed to override what we saw with our own eyes with his logic.
I came to notice a few similar inversions of the formation of knowledge. For instance, in his book written in the late 1990s, the Berkeley professor Highly Certified Fragilista Mark Rubinstein attributed to publications by finance professors techniques and heuristics that we practitioners had been extremely familiar with (often in more sophisticated forms) since the 1980s, when I got involved in the business.
No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice. That was our story, and it is easy to infer from it—and from similar stories—that the confusion is generalized. The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite...
AntiFragile makes lots of interesting points, but it's clear in some cases that Taleb is running roughshod over the truth in order to support his preferred view. I've italicized the particularly lame part:
...Now, one can see a possible role for basic science, but not in the way it is intended to be. For an example of a chain of unintended uses, let us start with Phase One, the computer. The mathematical discipline of combinatorics, here basic science, derived from propositional knowledge, led to the building of computers, or so the story goes... But at firs
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: